Our current issues are weighing on me, even though I’ve only ever been on the edge of the community since really joining in 2018.
I can’t imagine what others are going through, who thankfully take on the important responsibilities that are needed for the project to grow and continue.
I reflected on whether to keep caring, by reminding myself why I’m here:
an OS that I can understand and control
an OS that I can contribute to, and see the results immediately
an OS that heavily utilises automation and testing, providing a stable recent experience
Thank you all for building this. I hope for brighter, more harmonious days ahead.
Roughly similar sentiments here — I’ve also used NixOS for about the same length of time and apart from a few contributions here and there had mostly stayed on the sidelines.
And I’m also grate… thank… uh, well, whatever is the emotionally disabled equivalent of that… appreciative? of the project. Being able to reproducibly manage my homelab and machines, possibly even phones, is a real boon for someone as pathologically into self-sovereignty as I am. Being able to boot up the exact same machine a few hours after it’s storage gave out is a lifesaver. I suppose I could’ve achieved similar aims with something different, like immutable Fedora or even ZFS snapshots and something like Ansible, but there’s something that resonates with me in the way Nix does things.
So whatever the issues of the moment are in the community, I want y’all more active contributors and maintainers to feel that your work provides real value. Even if that seems self-evident to me, I suppose it always helps to hear some external feedback that reinforces all the effort you had put in your work was worthwhile.
I am in turn, grateful for this magnificent project, and as a sysadmin who has spent some time in IT, I observe that to date, NixOS is the only declarative OS, an OS not just a distro, that is truly usable in the wild. Guix System is too focused on HPC and pays too little attention to the desktop and, in general, what constitutes a modern FLOSS ecosystem, other NixOS forks are truly far from current usability.
This fact makes NixOS a target for those who dislike the declarative model because it could eliminates many businesses: with NixOS, creating a custom ISO and deploying it to n machines is a domestic-level activity, as is serious storage management with ZFS. Perhaps some will recall the outcry when SUN announced it, with some major storage players ridiculously asking to “un-free it” to prevent the destruction of their business.
Therefore, I would suggest drawing inspiration from this past to offer another interpretation of the tensions within the community, which perhaps many developers themselves have not yet fully weighed.
A widespread NixOS means self-hosting not only for individuals but also for SMEs, with characteristics far superior to any commercial alternative and with the commitment/knowledge required to maintain it certainly not being at élite-only levels. This doesn’t please many; since the dawn of IT, the bulk of IT players have worked to PREVENT desktop and personal computing and to keep most people in states of dependence on them.
Consider the current controversies in this light too, how they could be welcomed by some against the interests of NixOS and everyone else.
Thank you for showing me how broken IT actually is.
Thank you for a breaking my distro hopping cycle with something that I feel actually solves problems and provides me with a stable platform.
Thank your for building a distro where I feel that I can actually contribute something.
Thank your for providing an environment (Discourse, ZHF, NixCon 2024, etc) where I felt so welcome that I felt compelled to “pay back” in a meaningful way (NixCon 2025).
I cannot understand how such a classy distro that ticks all the boxes can suffer like this. I can only imagine that because it is such a fabulous distro that people are even more deeply engaged and feel strongly about it. There is a deep sense of ownership. I cannot imagine a human activity that should be more apolitical and agnostic and am just praying that we can keep the wheels turning.
I’m realtively new to Nixos, though not to Linux. I always found the concept of Nixos nice but wanted to stick to the UNIX way of doing things. Now that i tasted it, I think I’m all in.
Being new, I have no idea what it is that the distro or community is suffering from. Or maybe I can imagine it, we live in crazy times after all. I keep asking myself if this reality is something I can wake up from and find myself in what I believed for half a decade is real again.
I get the feeling that chances to keep anything apolitical or agnostic are getting slimmer by the day. Just because Nixos is quirky, nerdy and requires a certain amount of mental capacity to be even only a user does not shield it from what is going everywhere else.
I also don’t think that being apolitical or agnostic would be the right thing to be, even if it was possible to find the eye of the storm (Nixos as an island of reason). What little mental capacity is left in this new era should probably be brought to bear, to have some impact.
But then again, I don’t really know what you are talking about, I’m reading between the lines here, being a newcomer and all. I just don’t feel that - whatever the topic - agnostics is the proper approach at times like ours. And I’m not arguing in a partisan manner, if this is by any means about polarization, I don’t like (or agree with) much of what I hear from both sides. No arguments and no communication is not much better than partisan warfare. I miss the times when arguing had a purpose.
What I like most about Nixos is that it has a very distinct purpose. In the realm of Linuxes, this is maybe not unique but outstanding. I rarely had so much fun and so many surprising successes with a technology I expored. I don’t know the community producing these results yet, but I deeply respect it! I cannot imagine that these results are the consequence of avoiding conflicts though. There must have been long discussions and quite a bit of arguing to get to this point here.
I do like the sentiment here, and would like to add my appreciation as well. I’ve been messing with Linux for decades, since slackware diskettes. And some of the most frustrating times I’ve had is breaking my system because of package disagreements. After I discovered NixOS, I was SO HAPPY! I now have a very hard time using other distros. Thank you!